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The “Black Buddhism Plan”: Buddhism, Race, and Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2021

Adeana McNicholl
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Abstract

This article traces the life of a single figure, Sufi Abdul Hamid, to bring into conversation the history of the transmission of Buddhism to the United States with the emergence of new Black religio-racial movements in the early twentieth century. It follows Hamid's activities in the 1930s to ask what Hamid's life reveals about the relationship between Buddhism and race in the United States. On the one hand, Hamid's own negotiation of his identity as a Black Orientalist illustrates the contentious process through which individuals negotiate their religio-racial identities in tension with hegemonic religio-racial frameworks. Hamid constructed a Black Orientalist identity that resignified Blackness while criticizing the racial injustice foundational to the American nation-state. His Black Orientalist identity at times resonated with global Orientalist discourses, even while being recalcitrant to the hegemonic religio-racial frameworks of white Orientalism. The subversive positioning of Hamid's Black Orientalist identity simultaneously lent itself to his racialization by others. This is illustrated through Hamid's posthumous implication in a conspiracy theory known as the “Black Buddhism Plan.” This theory drew on imaginations of a Black Pacific community formulated by both Black Americans and by government authorities who created Japanese Buddhists and new Black religio-racial movements as subjects of surveillance. The capacious nature of Hamid's religio-racial identity, on the one hand constructed and performed by Hamid himself, and on the other created in the shadow of the dominant discourses of a white racial state, demonstrates that Buddhism in the United States is always constituted by race.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 332 - 378
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Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

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References

Notes

I would like to thank Joel Cabrita, James Campbell, Kathryn Gin Lum, Rachel Gross, and the participants of Stanford University’s ARGC proseminar for their comments on an earlier draft of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team for their insightful comments for revision.

1 Marvel Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H. Unveils His Universal Buddhist Holy Temple to Public: Black Hitler Intones Mystic Phrases for Crowd Attending Cult Opening,” The New York Amsterdam News, April 23, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News: 1922–1993.

2 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

3 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.,”

4 Cooke unfortunately does not provide detail about the audience demographics.

5 This is not the first time Hamid claimed to be able to speak Chinese. In June 1935, Hamid was arrested in what was reportedly a fifth attempt to deport him. The report of the incident in the New York Amsterdam News records that Sufi told investigators that he had traveled to Europe on an Arab passport, and he spoke Arab, Chinese, Italian, and French for investigators to prove that he had traveled through “the Old World.” Interpreters were brought to the police department to confirm his fluency. “Sufi Nabbed, Released on Alien Charge,” New York Amsterdam News, June 22, 1935, Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. In January 1935, he claimed to know “Sudanese, Hindustani, Arabic, Persian, Greek (which he learned while at school in Athens), Italian, and Cantonese, which he says he learned while on a trip to China in 1923.” His knowledge of Greek and Italian was reportedly confirmed by court attendants. “Negro Crusader Lays Arrest to ‘Persecutors,’” January 16, 1935, Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Claude McKay notes that “he did possess some knowledge of Greek, less Arabic and a smattering of the Romance languages. But his intimates knew he was born in the South and had gone to sea as a lad and voyaged all over the world. He had an excellent ear and was quick to acquire some command of a new language.” Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company Inc, 1940), 190.

6 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

7 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

8 Judith Weisenfeld, New World a Coming: Black Religion and Radical Identity during the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5.

9 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 5.

10 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 24.

11 One news article suggests one possible significance behind Hamid's choice of the color green. According to one New York Amsterdam News article, during the Harlem job protests in 1934, Hamid “paraded his Green shirted Negro nationalists in West 125th street.” Perhaps he continued to wear green after this time to show his commitment to the Harlem jobs movement. “Sufi Hamid Successor Is Picked: Bishop El-Amena Elected to Fill Shoes of Dead ‘Black Hitler,” The New York Amsterdam News, January 6, 1937, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

12 “Negro Crusader Lays Arrest to ‘Persecutors,’” 1935.

13 Black newspapers were one of the most important mediums of communication for African Americans in the early twentieth century. By 1930, 114 Black newspapers were in circulation, dedicated to showcasing the accomplishments, movements, and products of and for Black people. Some of these newspapers circulated nationally, including the Baltimore Afro-American (along the Atlantic coast), the Pittsburgh Courier (as far west as Texas), the Chicago Defender (with a nationwide circulation of more than 200,000 people by World War I), and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Lerone Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York: New York University Press), 77.

14 I submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests, in 2017 and 2021, for files pertaining to Sufi Abdul Hamid. Both searches came back empty. However, FBI files on Hamid appear in Dupree and Dupree 1993 and Hill 1995. For this article I rely on those records already published.

15 Cressler, Matthew, “Centering Black Catholic Religio-Racial Identity, Revealing White Catholicism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 2 (2020): 306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Goodwin, Megan, “Unmasking Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Hostility and/as White Supremacy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 2 (2020): 360CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Goodwin, “Unmasking Islamophobia,” 360.

18 Lerone Martin, “Bureau Clergyman: How the FBI Colluded with an African American Televangelist to Destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 28, no.1 (2018): 5.

19 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

20 For a discussion of this, see McNicholl, Adeana, “Buddhism and Race in the United States,” Religion Compass 15, no. 8 (2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For discussions and critiques of the Two Buddhisms theory see Joseph Cheah, “Buddhism, Race, and Ethnicity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, ed. Michael Jerryson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) 650–61 (Cheah notes that this typology reinforces Orientalist racializations of Buddhism); Wakoh Shannon Hickey, “Two Buddhisms, Three Buddhisms, and Racism,” Journal of Global Buddhism 11 (2010), 1–25 (Hickey discusses the ways that it marks whiteness as universal and normative); and Chenxing Han, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2021) (Han's study of young Asian American Buddhists challenges the theory's biological determinism and lack of attention to generational differences).

22 See Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), who stops his history at 1912.

23 Masatsugu, Michael K., “‘Beyond This World of Transiency and Impermanence’: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums, and the Making of American Buddhism during the Early Cold War Years,” Pacific Historical Review 77, no. 3 (2008): 423–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Wendy Cadge, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jeff Wilson, Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

25 While scholars have begun writing about Black Buddhists, this research has been largely limited to contemporary Buddhists, rather than to rethinking the larger historical narratives of Buddhism in the United States. See, for example, Ann Gleig, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); McNicholl, Adeana, “Being Buddha, Staying Woke: Racial Formation in Black Buddhist Writings,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86, no. 4 (2018): 883–911Google Scholar; and Vesely-Flad, Rima, “Black Buddhists and the Body: New Approaches to Socially Engaged Buddhism,” Religions 8, no. 11 (2017): 239–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Hamid never called himself by this term. I have not discovered any sources where Hamid provides a label for his own religio-racial identity. While Hamid eventually became known as a Black Buddhist, he retained his Muslim name and he continued to incorporate a broad number of religious practices into his Temple. I use the label “Black Orientalist” to illustrate how Hamid's embrace of an array of Asian religions, eventually brought under the banner of Buddhism, is a form of Black Orientalism.

27 Wallace Best, Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 58.

28 Jacob Dorman, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 154.

29 Dorman, Chosen People, 19–20.

30 Justin McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 255–66. See also Robert Ford Campany, “Religious Repertoires and Contestation: A Case Study Based on Buddhist Miracle Tales,” History of Religions 52, no. 2 (2012): 99–141.

31 Marvel Cooke reported on one other service in May 1938, which featured a similarly diverse program. The programming lasted through the afternoon into the evening. It began with “a grand parade of the ‘civic cadets,’” followed by a song service, “a spiritual feast under the direction of the Rev. Josephine B. Becton,” a play, a piano concert, and a banquet. The main temple service began at 8 p.m. and ended with “members of the audience seeking tranquility by concentrating on the flame of the candle which is passed to them by komonaed preceptors.” At some point during the evening he was joined by Yogini Nadi, who bowed before the Buddhist altar and offered Hamid a bouquet of flowers. Marvel Cooke, “Tranquility Flies Out Bishop Sufi's Window: New Cult Faces Drastic Shakeup as Ex-Black Hitler Takes Donations,” The New York Amsterdam News, May 28, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News.

32 Tracey E. Hucks, Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012), 27.

33 Hucks, Yoruba Traditions, 37.

34 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 18–19.

35 It's unclear if Hamid interacted with either white people interested in Buddhism or Asian American Buddhists, although the latter were active in New York during his lifetime. Chinese people began settling in New York in the late nineteenth century, primarily on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Some Japanese immigrants also arrived in New York in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the interwar years, New York's Japanese population grew, and “New York gained renown as a center for ethnic Japanese intellectuals, artists, and performers.” Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 54. Throughout this period, Japanese residents established social clubs and Christian churches (the first being the Japanese Christian Institute in 1899), as well as some Buddhist communities. In 1931, Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki, a Rinzai Zen monk, founded the Buddhist Society of America (now the First Zen Institute of America) at 63 West 70th Street and, in 1938, the Reverend Hozen Seki founded a Jodo Shinshu temple called the New York Buddhist Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Robinson, After Camp, 55.

36 See Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 252–53. Many newspapers pitted Father Divine against Sufi Abdul Hamid in their reporting. Hamid found himself having to deny links between his community and Father Divine's. Ted Poston, “Harlem Ex-Hitler Seeking Jewish Members for Cult,” New York Post, August 31, 1937, Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. After Hamid's death, the Afro-American reported that Hamid's community “was luring away members of the Divine Movement,” and that Hamid and Father Divine accused the other of having stolen their idea to build a community in upper New York. Ralph Matthews, “Was it Curse of Father Divine or Did Madam St. Clair Kill Sufi?” Afro-American, August 6, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Afro-American. Following Hamid's death, Father Divine reportedly declared “the wages of sin is death and they who oppose God cannot stand in that they rise in opposition to the foundations upon which they should stand.” Among Father Divine's followers, New York Amsterdam News reported that “gladness reigns supreme” “because death has struck down the imposing Buddhist bishop.” Ralph Matthews, “‘Wages of Sin Is Death,’ Says Divine of Sufi,” New York Amsterdam News, August 6, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News. The Afro-American suggested that members of the Peace Mission “believe that the death of Sufi came first, as a punishment for his defiance of Divine and second, to prove to the world that the idea of a heaven in upper New York was Divine's own idea and not Sufi's. Matthews, “Wages of Sin Is Death.”

37 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 97.

38 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 104.

39 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 106.

40 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 122.

41 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 92

42 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 92.

43 Susan Nance, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1700–1935 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

44 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 92.

45 Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 118.

46 McKay, Harlem, 185.

47 McKay, Harlem, 185.

48 Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 306.

49 Hamid reportedly organized the Oriental-Occidental Scientific-Philosophical Society in 1931, and after his death it was noted that “he has always been a student of Yogi mysteries and esoteric cults.” A. M. Wendell Malliet, “Seek Sufi's Fortune as Followers Begin Fight over Cult: Pick Carter to Succeed Sufi,” New York Amsterdam News, August 6, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News.

50 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 26.

51 Winston C. McDowell, “Keeping Them ‘In the Same Boat Together’? Sufi Abdul Hamid, African Americans, Jews, and the Harlem Jobs Boycotts,” in African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict, ed. V. P. Franklin et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 214–16.

52 Best, Langston's Salvation, 37.

53 McDowell, Winston C., “Race and Ethnicity During the Harlem Jobs Campaign, 1932–1935,” The Journal of Negro History 69, no. 3/4 (1984): 137–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 McDowell, “Keeping Them ‘In the Same Boat Together’?” 218.

55 McDowell, “Race and Ethnicity,” 139. Roi Ottley describes Hamid as “a crude racketeering giant who entered the confused, defeated ranks, posing as an evangelist of black labor.” Ottley, New World A-Coming, 116.

56 McKay, Harlem, 211.

57 See McDowell, “Race and Ethnicity.”

58 “Black Hitlerism Is Dead—What Now?” The New York Amsterdam News, December 29, 1934, Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

59 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 253–54.

60 McKay, Harlem, 196.

61 McDowell, “Race and Ethnicity,” 1984, 139. “Harlem's ‘Hitler’ Brought to Court,” New York Times, October 9, 1934, Schomburg Center Scrapbooks, Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

62 “Sufi Abdul Hamid, Harlem Hitler, Convicted of Preaching Atheism, Pleads He's Mohammedan,” n.d., Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

63 McKay, Harlem, 205.

64 McKay, Harlem, 210.

65 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 31.

66 Dorman, Chosen People, 9.

67 Dorman, Chosen People, 4.

68 Weisenfeld, New World a Coming, 87.

69 “Sufi Nabbed, Released on Alien Charge,” 1935.

70 Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 2.

71 Poston, “Harlem Ex-Hitler.”

72 Poston, “Harlem Ex-Hitler.”

73 “Harlem's Black Hitler Invites Jews to Enter New Religious Movement: Sufi Abdul Hamid Promises Equality to All Jews Who Will Join the Universal Order of Tranquility, Cult Based on Egyptian Philosophy,” The Jewish Chronicle 31, no. 48, September 10, 1937. McKay confirms that he was in Hamid's office when Hamid was contacted by “two Germans or German-Americans,” and Hamid attended a meeting with them, explaining to McKay that he wished “‘to find out what the pure blond Nordicans could have to offer to the pure black Africans when their Hitler says we are no better than monkeys. But I [Hamid] couldn't imagine cooperating with the Nazis any more than with the Ku Klux Klan.’” McKay, Harlem, 203.

74 “Harlem's Black Hitler Invites Jews.”

75 Marvel Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven’: Cult Temple's Opening Billed Easter Sunday: Plans Competition for Father Divine and Daddy Grace,” The New York Amsterdam News, April 16, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News.

76 Hamid does not disclose whose texts and translations he was reading. Dorman discusses the popular texts circulating among Black religious movements of the interwar period, including books published by De Laurence, Scott and Co. Jacob S. Dorman, “‘A True Moslem Is a True Spiritualist’: Black Orientalism and the Black Gods of the Metropolis,” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, ed. Edward E. Curtis VI and Danielle Burne Sigler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 122–24.

77 Poston, “Harlem Ex-Hitler.”

78 Lou Layne, “Madame Raps ‘Black Hitler,’” The New York Amsterdam News, November 20, 1937, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News.

79 Layne, “Madame Raps ‘Black Hitler.’”

80 “Mme. Fu Futtam Wed to Sufi Abdul Hamid,” The New York Amsterdam News, April 23, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News.

81 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

82 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

83 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

84 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

85 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

86 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

87 Hamid did start asking for donations after about a month, although he did not take collections during services. Cooke, “Tranquility Flies Out Bishop Sufi's Window.”

88 Best, Langston's Salvation, 57.

89 Johnson, African American Religions, 301.

90 See for example Best, Langston's Salvation, 131–37.

91 Best, Langston's Salvation, 112.

92 “Negro Crusader Lays Arrest to ‘Persecutors.’”

93 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

94 A. J. Liebling, “Not Harlem's ‘Black Hitler,’ Asserts Sufi Abdul Hamid,” New York World Telegram, October 9, 1934, Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

95 “Negro Crusader Lays Arrest to ‘Persecutors.”

96 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

97 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

98 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

99 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

100 Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’”

101 Cooke, “Tranquility Flies Out Bishop Sufi's Window.” At the May 1938 service witnessed by Cooke, Hamid had fed two hundred people before the 8 p.m. service began and offered more food following the service.

102 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

103 Cooke, “Tranquility Flies Out Bishop Sufi's Window.”

104 Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.”

105 Martin, Preaching on Wax.

106 Martin, Preaching on Wax, 31.

107 Charles Hallisey has termed this “intercultural mimesis,” which he defines as “occasions where it seems that aspects of a culture of a subjectified people influenced the investigator to represent that culture in a certain manner.” Charles Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 33. In doing so, he draws our attention to the process of cultural exchange between Euro-American scholars and Asian Buddhists in the production of knowledge about Buddhism and the “Orient.”

108 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 188–89.

109 Anningson, Ryan, “Once the Buddha Was an Aryan: Race Sciences and the Domestication of Buddhism in North America,” Journal of Religion and Culture 27, no. 1 (2017): 56Google Scholar.

110 Anningson, “Once the Buddha Was an Aryan,” 2017, 48.

111 J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 27.

112 Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 1997, 207.

113 Lowe, Critical Terrains, 2018, 5.

114 Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xv.

115 Mullen, Afro-Orientalism.

116 Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, xix.

117 Dorman, “‘A True Moslem Is a True Spiritualist,’” 117–18.

118 Dorman, “‘A True Moslem Is a True Spiritualist,’” 117.

119 Dorman, “‘A True Moslem Is a True Spiritualist.’” For a discussion of the popularity of Japanese aesthetics among the Black community in the early twentieth century, see Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 14–16.

120 Weisenfeld, New World A Coming, 6.

121 Sylvester Johnson, “The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America, 1926–1960,” in The FBI and Religion, ed. Sylvester Johnson and Steven Weitzman (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 57.

122 “Crash Fatal to ‘Harlem Hitler,’” Evansville Argus, 1, no. 6, August 6, 1938.

123 Malliet, “Seek Sufi's Fortune.”

124 “Old Hymns Stir Sufi Mourners: Exotic Moslem and Buddhist Rites Vie with Plain Southern Baptist Oration,” Afro-American, August 13, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Afro-American.

125 Ralph Matthews, “‘Sufi’ Cult God Killed: White Secretary Hurt; Superstitious Blame Father Divine,” Afro-American, August 6, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Afro-American.

126 “Mme. FuFuttam ‘Talks’ with Dead Hubby, Sufi,” The New York Amsterdam News, October 15, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News.

127 Matthews, “‘Sufi’ Cult God Killed”; “Old Hymns Stir Sufi Mourners.”

128 “Old Hymns Stir Sufi Mourners”; “Sufi's Widow Tells of Contact with Dead Mate,” The Chicago Defender, October 22, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender.

129 “Old Hymns Stir Sufi Mourners.”

130 Marvel Cooke, “‘. . . he done her wrong’: Stephanie Puts Finger on Sufi,” The New York Amsterdam News, October 28, 1939, 15. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News.

131 “‘Sufi’ Cult God Killed,” The Baltimore Afro-American, August 6, 1938, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Afro-American.

132 In newspaper reports from the court case in which St. Clair was charged with attempting to shoot Hamid, Hamid reportedly admits to having been married prior to his marriage to St. Clair: “I was married by the Arabic faith and divorced by the Arabic faith.” Marvel Cooke, “Mme. Sufi Up for Sentence: Black Hitler's Frau Punished,” The New York Amsterdam News, March 19, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News. This seems to be confirmed in a January 16, 1935, article in which Hamid claims to be currently living “with his wife, Sultana, and his son, Achmed.” “Negro Crusader Lays Arrest to ‘Persecutors.’” His son was said to be eight years old in 1935. “Purge Harlem's ‘Hitler’ with 20 Day Sentence,” The Pittsburgh Courier, January 26, 1935, Schomburg Center Scrapbooks: Harlem. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

133 Matthews, “Was It Curse of Father Divine.”

134 Harry B. Webber, “Sufi's Pilot Told to Get More Gas,” The Afro-American, August 6, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Afro-American.

135 Ralph Matthews, “Corrigan Flight Made Sufi Buy Ancient Crate: Cult Head Thought He Could Fly It to Japan,” Afro-American, August 6, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Afro-American.

136 “Japanese Angles Rise in Sufi's Plane Death: Cult Head Planned Nippon Flight, Got Oriental Funeral,” Afro-American, August 13, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Afro-American.

137 Robert A. Hill, The FBI's RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II (Boston: Northeast University Press, 1995), 429.

138 “Japs Started ‘BB Plan’ in Harlem Long Before Jordan Was Arrested,” The People's Voice 1, no. 3 (February 28, 1942); “Jap BB Plan Marches on by Timetable,” The People's Voice 1, no. 5 (March 14, 1942); Cheves Richardson, “Strategy of BB Plan Seen in Pacific War,” The People's Voice 1, no. 4 (March 7, 1942); Richardson, Cheves, “Sweeping Investigation under Way of Jap BB Plan of Conquest,” The People's Voice 1, no. 6 (March 21, 1942)Google Scholar.

139 Richardson's personal commitment to Buddhism is unclear, but he was well enough associated with the Temple that the New York Amsterdam News interviewed him about the fate of the temple shortly after Hamid's death. There he is described as “one of the earliest supporters of the bishop, even before he embraced the Buddhist faith.” “Friends Mourn Death of Ex-Soapbox Orator,” New York Amsterdam News, August 6, 1938, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News. Richardson was also involved in Hamid's job campaigns, succeeding Hamid as president of the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance in 1935. “Sufi Nabbed.”

140 Richardson, “Sweeping Investigation.”

141 Image from Richardson, “Sweeping Investigation.” Artist: Brandford.

142 The People's Voice suggested that authorities might try to connect Robert Jordan, known as the “Harlem Mikado,” to the “BB Plan,” although the plan allegedly began with Sufi Abdul Hamid. “Japs Started ‘BB Plan.’”

143 “Japs Started ‘BB Plan.’”

144 Richardson, “Strategy of BB Plan.”

145 The financing of the Temple had long been subject to speculation. In Hamid's sermon at the opening of the Temple, he told congregants that the means through which he got the Temple and the Universal City was “his business.” Cooke, “Bishop Sufi A.A.M.M.S.A.H.” One article speculates that Madame Futtam financed the temple, or perhaps Hamid had succeeded at the numbers racket and invested that money into the Temple. Cooke, “Sufi Opens Rival ‘Heaven.’” After his death, there was brief speculation that the Temple was financed by wealthy white people. Malliet, “Seek Sufi's Fortune.”

146 “Japs Started ‘BB Plan.’” Richardson was a friend of Hamid and closely connected to his Temple. If he was the author of all four People's Voice articles, this would suggest that perhaps Hamid did have warm feelings toward Japan before his death.

147 Gerald Horne, Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 86.

148 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 86.

149 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 86.

150 “Jap BB Plan Marches On.”

151 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 96. See also Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 118–19; Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 150; and Gerald Horne, “Tokyo Bound: African Americans and Japan Confront White Supremacy,” in Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line, ed. Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones (New York: Palgrave MacMillan), 198–99. The FBI did retain files on Sufi Abdul Hamid prior to his death for allegedly recruiting people to serve in the Italo-Ethiopian war on behalf of Ethiopia, and for his involvement with the Harlem Labor Union in 1934. Sherry Sherrod Dupree and Herbert C. Dupree, Exposed!!! Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Unclassified Reports on Churches and Church Leaders (Washington: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 1993), 29. In the FBI's RACON report, Hamid appears in the New York Field Division's report on “Individuals Who Agitate in Harlem” as “Sufi Hammed.” The report describes Hamid as having “dressed similar to an Arab chief or prophet,” being “well educated, a linguistic, speaking several languages,” and being “very anti-white and to have followed the program and principles of Marcus Garvey in advocating the migration of Negroes to Liberia for the purpose of establishing a government there.” Hill, The FBI's RACON, 193. He's noted for his role in a 1936 boycott of white-owned stores that failed to hire Black people, and for reportedly traveling in the United States to enlist men in to fight in the Ethiopian-Italian war. Hill, The FBI's RACON, 199.

152 Etsuko Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire Between the World Wars (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), 9.

153 Williams, Duncan Ryūken, “Complex Loyalties: Issei Buddhist Ministers during the Wartime Incarceration,” Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies 3, no. 5 (2003) 255–74Google Scholar; Duncan Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Cambridge: Belknap, 2019), 27–38.

154 Williams, “Complex Loyalties,” 256.

155 Williams, “Complex Loyalties,” 256.

156 Williams, “Complex Loyalties,” 256.

157 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 95.

158 See Horne, Race War!; Horne, “Tokyo Bound”; Horne, Facing the Rising Sun; Johnson, “The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America”; and Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative.

159 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 39–40.

160 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 6–7

161 See Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 19.

162 Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 64.

163 Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 42–44. Not all Black Americans were sympathetic to Asian immigrants. Robinson notes instances of African Americans sharing widespread suspicions of Asians and feeling “threatened by competition from Japanese laborers.” Some supported the 1924 Immigration Act's exclusion of Japanese (and other Asian) immigrants “on the grounds that it would aid black economic empowerment.” And others reported cases of anti-Black discrimination among Japanese merchants. Robinson, After Camp, 160. During World War II, responses to the incarceration of Japanese Americans differed among the Black community, with some being indifferent or silent, or even welcoming it. Robinson, After Camp, 160–61. Despite “the lack of collective action,” some individuals did fight against anti-Japanese racism, both before and after the passing of Executive Order 9066. Robinson, After Camp, 162. After removal began, opposition to Japanese incarceration increased, with Black activists seeing a dangerous precedent in the racial discrimination displayed in the carrying out of Executive Order 9066.

164 Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 54–60.

165 See Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 2014, 58–85. FBI surveillance reports from 1935 record that Hamid tried to enlist recruits to serve in support of Ethiopia. Dupree and Dupree, EXPOSED!!! 28–29. A January 1936 report alleged that Hamid and “Ace” Hawkins had traveled to North Carolina to raise funds to purchase an airplane for Hawkins to use in Ethiopia. Dupree and Dupree, EXPOSED!!! 29.

166 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 47–48.

167 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 84.

168 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 61.

169 Onishi, Yuichiro, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

170 Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 41.

171 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 13.

172 Taketani The Black Pacific Narrative, 13–14.

173 Hill, The FBI's RACON, 509–10, 514–17.

174 Hill, The FBI's RACON, 4.

175 Hill, The FBI's RACON, 507.

176 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 13.

177 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 12.

178 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 6.

179 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 6.

180 Taketani, The Black Pacific Narrative, 6.

181 Johnson, African American Religions, 312.

182 Johnson, African American Religions, 313.

183 Johnson, “The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America,” 58–65.

184 Johnson, “The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America,” 59.

185 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 87–88.

186 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 84.

187 Horne, Facing the Rising Sun, 84.